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Integral Resilience

Posted October 22nd, 2008 by Robert Maxwell

At present my special interest is in the R word, Resilience, a word that we hear more frequently in these times of accelerated change. Semanticaly in has several meanings, one scientific one is the ability of a system to absorb an disturbance without being essentially changed. To paraphase "the ability to roll with the punches."

However the concept of resilience is much bigger in fact its a bit like findings a 800lb (364kg) gorilla in the lounge room. It has scale, massive scale the smallest organelle can exihibit resilience, as can an eco-system, a planet even a universe. 

Resilience is open to quadrant analysis. In the upper right we have personal beliefs, values, our pyschological makeup. In the upper rigth we have intact nervous system, functioning metabolism and clean food and water. In the lower left we have the cultural shared beliefs, our myths and the stories we tell about ourselves and our community structures. In the lower right we have ecologies, economic sytems, education, health systems, transport etc.

 I have grossed over this hoping ours are interested. I think resilience is worthy of deeper study and would welcome your contributions

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Yeah, lets discuss resilience!

Posted December 27th, 2008 by JeanneSimons

Hi Robert,

I work in K-12 education reform, with a focus on mathematics, and have often been fascinated by the concept of resilience. Obviously there is a lot about this topic in the literature surrounding counseling traumatized children and in the special education literature. I have only very limited knowledge of the topic however since these are not my specialties.

I believe many of the problems students in schools express when they have experienced years of failure academically is quite literally related to trauma from the school experience. In fact, one common method of stressing people in psychology experiments is to make them do a math problem. One of the few proven changes in mindset shown to move a child to success in mathematics is to change their conception of math success from being rooted in natural ability to one where success is rooted in effort, but doing this in a student who has repeatedly failed and disappointed teachers and parents is quite difficult. I have often thought of using the concept of resilience to move students forward past the trauma but have not had the time to really focus on this in order to first understand the concept and then decide how to best apply it.

I believe that the study of people who go through life trauma and still manage to thrive is very important. It really should be able to inform nearly every person's development virtually from birth to death in dealing with both both major and minor life events. I think breaking it down from an integral perspective would be absolutely fascinating and I would be happy to engage in a thought experiment with you if you are still interested.

Could you possibly direct me to some fairly concise overviews of the topic (I am in the middle of a fairly complex project and don't have abundant time to read books right now) or provide an overview yourself so I can bring myself up to speed?

I'm quite excited and I hope to hear from you soon,

Jeanne